Finger-twined storage bag made of bast fibers and wool yarn in red, blue and yellow.

History

Following the Black Hawk War of 1832, the United States government enacted policies to forcibly remove American Indians from their Wisconsin lands. By 1854 the once vast territories occupied by the Ojibwa (Chippewa) of Wisconsin were reduced to small reservations in the northern part of the state. In the face of this upheaval, many Native people worked hard to keep their traditional ways of life intact. This storage bag, created with a hand-weaving technique known as finger-twining, represents the persistence of a traditional craft that was transformed repeatedly in response to new cultural influences. The earliest finger-twined bags were made with locally available materials such as basswood, nettle fibers and buffalo hair. When fur traders brought wool blankets into the region beginning in the eighteenth century, Great Lakes Indian women adapted this new material into the bags they made. By the 1870s, brightly colored chemically dyed wool yarns spun by machines in eastern textile mills were widely available, and weavers incorporated this product of American industry into their bags. This bag was collected in northern Wisconsin between 1914 and 1952 by H. L. Mumm and acquired by the Wisconsin Historical Society in 1954.

Sources

Sally Forelli, "The Twined Bags of the Indians of the Western Great Lakes" M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1973; Andrew Hunter Whiteford, “Fiber Bags of the Great Lakes Indians,” American Indian Art Magazine 2, no. 3 (1977) and 3, no. 1 (1977); Ruth Bliss Phillips, "Dreams and Designs: Iconographic Problems in Great Lakes Twined Bags" in Great Lakes Indian Art, ed. David W. Penney (Detroit: Wayne State University Press and the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1999), pp. 52-69.